How does access to this work benefit you? Let us know!

City University of New York (CUNY) City University of New York (CUNY)

CUNY Academic Works CUNY Academic Works

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects CUNY Graduate Center

6-2017

Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism in New York City During Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism in New York City During the Long Sixties

the Long Sixties

David C. Viola Jr.

The Graduate Center, City University of New York

How does access to this work benefit you? Let us know!

More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1956 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu

This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY).

Contact: [email protected]

T ERRORISM AND THE R ESPONSE TO T ERRORISM IN N EW Y ORK C ITY

D URING THE L ONG S IXTIES

B Y

D AVID C. V IOLA , J R .

A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York

2017

© 2014

D AVID C. V IOLA , J R .

A LL R IGHTS R ESERVED

Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism in New York City During the Long Sixties

by
 David C. Viola, Jr.

This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in History in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

_________________ ____________________________________________

Date Chair of Examining Committee

Joshua B. Freeman, Distinguished Professor of History, Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY

_________________ ____________________________________________

Date Andrew Robertson, Professor of History and Executive Officer, PhD Program in History, The Graduate Center, CUNY

S UPERVISORY C OMMITTEE

Joshua B. Freeman, Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY Beverly Gage, Yale University

Thomas Kessner, The Graduate Center, CUNY David Nasaw, The Graduate Center, CUNY

T HE C ITY U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK

ABSTRACT

T ERRORISM AND THE R ESPONSE TO T ERRORISM IN N EW Y ORK C ITY

D URING THE L ONG S IXTIES

By

David C. Viola, Jr.

Advisor: Joshua B. Freeman

During a period stretching from the mid 1960s until the mid 1970s, the United States and especially New York City experienced a wave of terrorism unprecedented in many ways. Never before, and never since, have such a variety of actors from all across the political spectrum engaged in this particular form of political violence during the same period of time and especially in the same small geographic area. New York City endured a stretch of attacks that can be labeled as terrorism from 1969 to mid-1970 that the Commissioner Howard R. Learly of the New York City Police Department (NYPD) characterized it as the year of bombings in “gigantic proportions” when testifying before Congress.

Scholarship on political radicalism and especially terrorism during what many scholars have termed “the Long Sixties” has largely focused on radical elements of the New Left such as the Weather Underground. This dissertation argues that, instead of how scholarship has traditionally treated it, terrorism during the time and in New York city was just as likely to emanate from the political right, and may have in fact manifested there first.

This dissertation also makes the argument that terrorism and the response to terrorism –

most notably by the NYPD and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) – coevolved during the

period. The actions of terror actors prompted more aggressive investigations by authorities, and

the actions of authorities drove terror actors further underground. Building on “intelligence”

operations including undercover operatives and secret informants, authorities brought to bear many of the practices that would soon land them in legal trouble such as occurred during the U.S.

Senate Church Committee investigation and the “Handschu” civil liberties case brought against the NYPD. And in response to these aggressive and often effective actions by authorities, groups like the Weather Underground in fact went underground.

Ultimately, what this dissertation argues is that the history of terrorism in the United States

is longer and more diverse than is commonly understood, and even more so than argued in

scholarly history, and that the time and place of New York City during this period is uniquely

important because of the diversity of the actors and the sheer volume of attacks illustrates how

much more broadly accepted this form of political violence was than ever was before, or ever

since.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The historical study of terrorism and the responses to terrorism in New York City, and in U.S.

more broadly, is a personal pursuit (as a native New Yorker who still lives in the wake of 9/11), a professional endeavor (as a military intelligence counterterrorism officer), and most importantly, a scholarly endeavor that I believe is vastly more important to the history of the United States than has been acknowledged in preceding scholarship.

The faculty, staff, and student body of the PhD program in history has been tremendously supportive of my research over the years, despite (and in large part because) the history of terrorism is not something that is often spoken of on the fifth floor of the Graduate Center. The atmosphere of support in investigating new and different directions in the field has been tremendous and for this I will always be grateful.

First and foremost among the individuals who has made this dissertation possible is Professor Joshua B. Freeman, my dissertation committee chair. The guidance and encouragement he offered along the way, the willingness to read several rough chapters and steer me back on track when I wandered, and the continuing education in twentieth century U.S. history that characterized each of our conversations, were invaluable. Professors David Nasaw and Thomas Kessner, also of my dissertation committee, likewise offered tremendous guidance and direction not only during my dissertation process, but also in amazing courses with each that is the foundation upon which my historical studies are based. And Professor Beverly Gage of Yale was not only generous enough to sit on my committee, but her research and writing on terrorism in the United States has had nothing short of a profound impact on the direction of my own path as a scholar of the subject.

I am lucky to have been trained under each of the members of my committee and to now call each

a colleague and a friend.

Support at the Graduate Center has extended beyond my dissertation committee; Executive Officers Helena Rosenblatt and Andrew Robertson (also a professor of mine) have been supportive all along the way; department staff Marilyn Weber and Huber Jaramillo keep things running so smoothly that we often forget how valuable that level of support is; and finally, my cohort and my peers in the history department, a longer list than I can satisfy here, have been friends, sounding boards, and trench-mates over these past years as we all worked our way through coursework, orals, figuring out how to be professors, and then planning and executing our dissertations.

Without the easy comradery that exists in the program, this wouldn’t have been possible or nearly as much fun.

The staff and my colleagues and students at the Center for Terrorism at John Jay College, where I have taught terrorism courses for more than four years, have challenged and shaped me as a scholar. Chief among them is Chuck Strozier, the Director of the Center and an accomplished historian and terrorism scholar, and a long supporter of my research endeavors. Scholars Jeremy Varon of The New School and Thai Jones of Columbia lead a longer list of scholars whose work mine would not be possible without, and who have been more than generous with their time.

Joshua Melville and Ivan Acosta must also be mentioned – Josh has become a friend as we discussed the life of his father Sam over the past few years, and Ivan was willing enough to not only speak of his own experiences in the Cuban exile community but share his contacts as well.

Of course, no historian gets anywhere in life without the tireless work of the archivists who

make it all possible. Without them, this dissertation simply would not have happened. No real

historical writing ever would. I will always be grateful to the staff at the National Archives and

Records Administration in New York, the FBI Freedom of Information / Privacy Act team

including David Sobonya, the staff at La Guardia and Wagner Archives at the Fiorello H.

LaGuardia Community College, the Special Collections Librarian at the Lloyd Sealy Library at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the New York Municipal Archive staff, and the staff at the New York County District Attorney’s Office Records Division who dug up court records for me that haven’t been seen since the cases were closed before my lifetime. Thanks also goes out to the staff of the Mina Rees Library and the Interlibrary Loan office for their assistance in retrieving the massive stack of books referenced in this dissertation.

As I continued to scratch out a living in graduate school, I have been blessed with love and support of an infinitely better family and group of friends than I deserve. My niece and nephew, Sophia and Thomas, who I hope both follow in my steps and pursue graduate education (or something else that challenges and enriches their lives), my brother Victor, my mom and step dad, all deserve special mention. Dear friends including Shan Nicholson, Andrew Wonder, and Richard Boccato, have read, critiqued, and been supportive of me and my work over the years. My colleagues in the U.S. Navy Reserve Intelligence Community have similarly been supportive of and had an enriching impact on my development as a terrorism and counterterrorism professional.

Finally, this dissertation is dedicated to Charley, my best friend for eleven years and the best Siberian Husky to ever walk the planet, and by far the best study buddy I could have hoped for as I pursued my graduate education. Whether it was sitting by my side as I worked toward my first Master’s degree outside of Boston, or during coursework in New York, or studying for written exams and then orals and then writing dissertation chapters in the Berkshires – but most importantly when it was time for a break to enjoy a Sunday in Central Park or a hike around Lake Garfield – my time as a graduate student was profoundly enriched by the time I had with him.

Charley passed away two days before I defended this dissertation, but his spirit lives on in every

single word I wrote and everything that follows.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

A PPROVAL P AGE Page iii

A BSTRACT Page iv – v

A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS Page vi – ix

I NTRODUCTION : Page 1 – 24

P ART I :

NYPD, FBI, and Early Terrorist Plots in NYC During the Long Sixties Page 25 - 137

Chapter 1 : The FBI and NYPD Page 25 (22 pages)

Chapter 2 : The Monumental Plot Page 50 (26 pages)

Chapter 3 : The 1966 Minutemen Plot Page 77 (30 pages)

Chapter 4 : Cuban Power 1968 Page 109 (23 pages)

P ART II :

The Melville Collective and the Year of Gigantic Proportions Page 133 – 231 Chapter 5 : The Melville Collective - Emergence Page 138 (28 pages) Chapter 6 : George Demmerle - Portrait of an Informer Page 162 (13 pages) Chapter 7 : The Melville Collective - Conclusion Page 176 (49 pages)

P ART III :

A Decade of Terror Page 227 – 311

Chapter 8 : The Weather Underground Page 232 (23 pages) Chapter 9 : The Jewish Defense League Page 251 (25 pages)

Chapter 10 : A Retreating Response Page 277 (28 pages)

C ONCLUSION Page 307 – 327

B IBLIOGRAPHY Page 328 – 338

INTRODUCTION

On July 4

, 1914, the morning marking the 138

birthday of the nation was violently disrupted by a monstrous explosion in New York City’s Harlem, at 1626 Lexington Avenue near 102

street.

When the smoke cleared, dazed onlookers could see that that the top three floors of the new six- story tenement house had been reduced to a smoldering chaos of splinters, the wrought iron fire escape twisted and collapsed upon itself and around the broken body of a young man, and the street below littered with debris, furniture, and shards from the hundreds of windows that had shattered with the concussion. Five known anarchists – associates of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman – had been in the apartment constructing a bomb intended for John D. Rockefeller when the dynamite unexpectedly detonated. Four were killed in the explosion; the sole survivor escaped with his life when the bathtub he was in fell through the floor that disintegrated beneath him.

The stretch from October 1914 to July 1915 was especially tense in New York City; in the eight months after the Harlem explosion, anarchists targeted a myriad of locations in the boroughs for bomb attacks, including St. Patrick’s Cathedral, courthouses, and other government buildings.

And in April of 1919, thirty-six mail bombs were sent by post to different political leaders, judges, and law enforcement officials across the country; the bombs were intended to arrive on May Day.

Punctuating what is remembered as the first American Red Scare, that same summer eight larger

1

“Exploded in Apartment Occupied by Tarrytown Disturbers: Only One Escaped Alive,” New York Times, July 5

, 1914. For the history of anarchism including anarchist violence such as bombings and assassinations – “propaganda of the deed” as famed anarchist Johann Most

referred to it – see Anarchist Portraits (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990), Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994) and Sacco and Vanzetti (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996) by Paul Avrich.

2

Thai Jones’s More Powerful Than Dynamite: Radicals, Plutocrats, Progressives, and New

York's Year of Anarchy (New York: Walker, 2012) is a comprehensive exploration of this

tumultuous year in New York City.

bombs exploded in eight different American cities including New York, targeting similar individuals (and in the case of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, the same individual) as the mail bombs, propelling the Palmer Raids and mass anarchist deportations of 1919 and 1920.

The history of what we know as terrorism in New York City, then, did not begin on a warm and cloudless Tuesday morning in September of 2001, or even on a cold February afternoon in 1993 when Islamic extremists first attempted to bring down the World Trade Center. Historians including Beverly Gage and Thai Jones compellingly show how New York City, and the nation, suffered through this earlier era of anarchism-related terrorism, the most dramatic of the episodes – the 1920 bombing of the J.P. Morgan Bank on Wall Street – resulting in the death of thirty-eight civilians.

And a century and a half ago, the Ku Klux Klan embarked upon what is without question the longest, deadliest, and most impactful campaign of terrorism in U.S. history.

3

Several works explore America’s first Red Scare. See Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded, A Story of America in its First Age of Terror (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) and Tim Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI at War (New York: Random

House, 2012). See also David M. Kennedy’s Over Here: The First World War and American Society, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980) and Ann Hagedorn’s Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007). Before that, Robert K.

Murray’s Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955) set an early standard for scholarship on the subject.

4

See Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded. The 1920 J.P. Morgan Bank bombing was the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history until the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 claimed the lives of 168 people.

5

The long, ebbing and flowing KKK campaign of terror, and the socio-political context within

which it sits, is a rich area still underexplored in historical scholarship. Mark David Chalmer’s

still-authoritative Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan (Durham: Duke

University Press, 1981) explores the long history of the Klan, or rather three historically distinct

iterations of the Klan. Also see Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy

and Southern Reconstruction (Louisiana State University Press, 1971)

Terrorism has in fact been a part of the American political and social landscape since the birth of the nation.

Anarchism, anarchist terrorism, and the Red Scare subsided in the years after the 1920 Wall Street bombing, and, for decades that followed, terrorism was not among the major concerns for an America that had many things – not least among them the Great Depression and another World War, and the coming of the Cold War – to contend with. Terrorism, however, was soon to reemerge in American society.

During what Jeremy Varon and other scholars have termed “the long Sixties,” a period stretching from the emergence of the protest movements that characterized the era in the 1950s until it generally subsided in the mid 1970s, the nation underwent one of the most dramatic and volatile chapters in post-Civil War U.S. history. The latter half of that era was accompanied by a new age of terrorism that in some respects was the most violent in the history of the nation.

6

Even before the rise of the KKK during Reconstruction, episodes like the Trail of Tears and perhaps Revolutionary actions like the Boston Tea Party can be understood through the modern conceptual framework of terrorism (“Perhaps George Washington, not Alexander Berkman, was America’s first terrorist,” Gage provocatively suggests in the Journal of American History).

However, at those earlier points in time the word would most certainly be understood in the French Reign of Terror context.

7

As scholar Simon Hall argues, ‘[t]he concept of a ‘long 1960s’ is now well established in the scholarly literature.” (Hall, “Framing the American 1960s: A Historiographical Review,”

European Journal of American Culture, Volume 31 Number 1, April 2012) Historians from Arthur Marwick to Gerd-Rainer Horn to Jeremy Varon argue that the Sixties as we think of them actually begin in the mid 1950s – perhaps as early as the first mass civil rights actions in

Montgomery, Alabama – and continue midway into the next decade, after the end of America’s involvement in Vietnam and the subsiding of much of the protest movement in the United States.

See Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c.1958-c.1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Gerd-Rainer Horn, The Spirit of '68:

Rebellion in Western Europe and North America, 1956-1976 (New York: Oxford University

Press, 2007); and Varon, both in Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red

Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 2004), and as co-editor of The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and

This work explores the span from 1965 into the first few years of the following decade;

essentially, the latter half of the “long Sixties,” when terrorism reemerged, escalated, and peaked in New York City.

In July of 1970, almost a quarter-century before the first attack on the World Trade Center, a Treasury Department official testified before a U.S. Senate Committee that “the figures do graphically reveal that terrorist acts of violence and anarchy by bombing have reached menacing proportions in our country. From January, 1969 to April of this year – a scant 15-month period – this country suffered a total of 4,330 bombings, an additional 1,475 attempted bombings, and a reported 35,129 threatened bombings.”

Culture. The collected essays of The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicals (edited by Dan Berger, himself a scholar of the Weather Underground), argue that some of the most iconic events in the history of Sixties radicalism in fact happened in the 1970s, and this dissertation furthers that argument.

8

Riots, Civil and Criminal Disorders: Hearings Before the Permanent Subcomittee on

Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations, United States Senate, Ninety-First Congress, Second Session, July 15, 16, 17, 21, 22, and 29, 1970 (Hereinafter referred to as

“Senate: Riots, Civil and Criminal Disorders”). Statement of Eugene T. Rossides, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Enforcement and Operations, page 5343. To compare with other periods in U.S. history, these levels of violence can be put in historical context with Klan violence, which is, unfortunately, difficult to get a grasp on for many reasons. First, the Klan was far from a monolithic organization or even movement between its emergence after the Civil War and the period under consideration. Secondly, violence against African Americans and their supporters often, or even regularly, went unreported. Some dramatic twentieth century episodes of violence including the 16

Street Baptist Church terrorist bombing in 1963 and the murder of civil rights activists in 1964 and 1965 are well documented; the more exact and inclusive register of Klan violence, however, is a much harder task to accomplish and well outside the scope of this paper. Klan lynchings are one area where some competent historical research can be pointed to. The Tuskegee University Library contains a little-known archive on KKK activities – The Klan Archive. According to a report compiled by the Tuskegee University Archive Directors Monroe Work and Danny Williams between the 1940s and 1969, the Klan was responsible for 4,473 verifiable lynchings between 1882 and 1968; however, current Tuskegee University Archivist Dana Chandler argues that due to the exacting standards for inclusion on the list by the Directors and because of what one must assume are a substantial number of unreported lynchings that occurred in that timeframe, the actual number is probably well in excess of 5,000. (See

“Lynchings, Whites and Negroes, 1882 – 1968,” available on the Tuskegee Library website,

http://192.203.127.197/archive - last accessed May 18

, 2016).

New York City was the violent epicenter of this era of terrorism in the United States. No other county in the nation was targeted by terrorist bombers as much as Manhattan, let alone New York City’s five boroughs combined.

At the same Senate hearing, New York City Police Department (NYPD) Commissioner Howard R. Leary testified that the level of attacks in New York had reached “gigantic proportions… since January of 1969, there have been 368 bombing incidents…” – more than twice the amount of such attacks in New York City as in the eight preceding years combined.

This work explores that dramatic reemergence of terrorism in New York City during one of the most turbulent times in Gotham’s (and America’s) twentieth century, and the response to it by the authorities most directly tasked with countering it – the NYPD and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

9

Manhattan alone, and not even New York City more broadly, was the American county with the most incidents of terrorism (the overwhelming majority of them bombings) between 1970 and 2008 – by more than a factor of two relative to Los Angeles, the next county on the list – according to a recent work by Gary LaFree and Bianca Bersani; “Hot Spots of Terrorism and Other Crimes in the United States, 1970 to 2008,” Final Report to Human Factors/Behavioral Sciences Division, Science and Technology Directorate, U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

College Park, MD: START, 2012. During the decade of the 1970s alone, Manhattan more than doubled the terrorist attacks in San Francisco, the next closest location, the report concludes. In comparison, southern racial terror, including KKK violence, was more often than not in the form of lynchings and similar types of physical violence, and not explosives. This work does not intend to make a direct corollary between bombings and terrorism; that would be a false equivalency. A bomb is not always terrorism, and terrorism is not always conducted with a bomb. Outside of the U.S. south, where racial terrorism manifested in other ways more

frequently, though, almost all tracked terrorism during the era was conducted with some kind of an explosive device. Exceptions certainly exist even in the south, including the 1963 bombing of the 16

Street Baptist Church in Birmingham and the nearly two dozen terrorist bombings in that city that preceded it. See “Six Dead in Church Bombing,” Washington Post, September 16

, 1963.

10

Senate: Riots, Civil and Criminal Disorders, (Statement of Howard R. Leary, Commissioner of

the New York Police Department - NYPD), page 5372. My emphasis.

In an era characterized by the political and social turmoil that reverberated through New York City, the nation, and the world, the role that terrorism played in the larger narrative is often reduced to the end-point in a declension narrative of left wing movements during the period: that after peaceful (or at least non-violent) beginnings, extremist elements of these movements turned to ill-advised and ultimately self-destructive terrorism campaigns and other forms of political violence. Even renowned terrorism scholar David Rapoport’s highly influential periodization of modern terrorism into four “waves” describes the wave from 1960 through 1980 as the “New Left”

wave.

But what this dissertation questions is if that narrative and our understanding of the long Sixties oversimplifies the more complex truth of the era; was it exclusively the young, aggravated, long-haired extremists of the political left that turned to terrorism? What role did right wing political actors play in the reemergence of terrorism during the era in New York City and the nation?

11

David C. Rapoport, “The Four Waves of Modern Terrorism,” Anthropoetics 8, no. 1 (Spring / Summer 2002)

12

The distinction between political “left” and “right” in this work relies on what would be understood to encapsulate these categories during the long Sixties; the left included the

traditional left of labor activists, Students for a Democratic Society, the Civil Rights movement, and the Democratic party, as well as the emergent New Left; see Van Gosse, The Movements of the New Left, 1950–1975: A Brief History with Documents (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2004), and John McMillan and Paul Buhle, editors, The New Left Revisited (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003). The right included those in opposition to the change advocated for by the diffuse left, including anti-Civil Rights and anti-communist organizations and movements.

These are, admittedly, imperfect categorizations. Many on the “New Left” did not

philosophically associate with those on the “old” left, and even many on what are considered the

“right” – like Cuban exiles, for their opposition to the Cuban Revolution, a vanguard of the left, and like American anti-communist and the Jewish Defense League, for their opposition to the

“old” left vanguard of communism and the “New Left” vanguard of Castro’s Cuba and North

Vietnam – were also well-versed and may have adopted aspects of Marxist-Leninist and Maoist

philosophy and tactics. Perhaps better described as a circular spectrum than a straight line with

binaries, the extremes of both left and right were not unlikely to find at least some common

ground on the fringes of their politics.

And therein lie the first set of interrelated questions this work explores. First, who were these terrorist actors? Looking beyond the most notable and notorious actors that most scholarship focuses on, on the political left, this work argues that a much wider range of terrorists were active in Gotham than the scholarship suggests. In New York City as elsewhere in the nation, anti- government and anti-Vietnam War protestors like the Weather Underground and the Sam Melville collective, virulent anti-communists like the Minutemen, radical religious organizations like the Jewish Defense League, nationalists of various stripes from Cuba and Puerto Rico and as far away as Croatia, and a myriad of other groups and individuals from across the political spectrum, embraced terrorism to promote their political goals. I argue that a more accurate depiction of the long Sixties reveals not just, and maybe not even primarily, the political left turning to terrorism in New York City, where this kind of political violence was by far most prevalent. Groups on the political right, largely ignored by historians just as they were ignored by Republican candidate for President Richard Nixon as he promoted his push for a return to “Law and Order” in the 1968 election season, had an early and lasting impact on the era.

The second fundamental question this work explores is, what was the dynamic relationship

between these terrorist actors and the local and federal agencies tasked with responding to their

actions? The organizations this study focuses on are the NYPD and the FBI, the primary local and

the primary federal organizations that found themselves responding to the resurgent threat of

terrorism in New York City. Two fundamental concepts that undergird this work are: that

terrorism and counterterrorism during this era coevolve, that both are directly impacted by

developments amongst the other group of actors, and that a consideration of one must also take

into account the other; and secondly that law enforcement intelligence operations are absolutely

central in countering terrorism. That holds true not just in the period under consideration but

throughout all of modern U.S. history. Michael Hayden, Director of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), argued soon after the 9/11 attacks that “[i]ntelligence – and how we use it – is our first line of defense against terrorists…”

How did the actions of these organizations, then, build upon the activities and experiences of earlier generations of law enforcement and intelligence in response to a new era of terrorism in New York City? How were these agencies themselves impacted by the tumultuous socio-political atmosphere of the long Sixties – both locally in New York City and at the national level – and by the actions of terrorist actors as it reemerged in American society?

I argue that the law enforcement and intelligence excesses of the era, significantly exhibited by the Watergate and COINTELPRO scandals on the national level and the so-called “Panther 13”

case and Handschu class-action lawsuit against the NYPD on the local level, had substantial impacts on the methods by which, and then the ability and effectiveness of, these agencies to counter the threat posed by terrorists. Of particular note is that it is these organizations own efforts to thwart terrorism – such as in the case of FBI’s Squad 47, established to investigate the Weather Underground, and the famous so-called “Panther 13” case involving the NYPD – that resulted in some of the most impactful curtailments of these agencies abilities.

DEFINING TERRORISM

What has been called ‘terrorism’ has evolved over the centuries. Prominent scholars in terrorism studies including Bruce Hoffman and Walter Laqueur argue that the term first came to prominence

13

Michael Hayden quoted in The National Security Strategy of the United States of America,

Washington, D.C., page 30, (September 2002)

during the French Revolution and then meant something quite different than it does in our own time.

In contrast to terrorism as we generally perceive it today – and how it was perceived during the long Sixties

– as being conducted by subnational or clandestine agents in the shadows, the French Reign of Terror (1793-1794) was a systematic use of oppression, intimidation, and execution by the recently ascended revolutionary government as a method of subduing perceived dissidents; it was a tool openly utilized by those in power, not clandestinely by those seeking power.

This “terrorism from above,” as it is sometimes referred to, is a particular form of political oppression that, while many argue is still practiced by some nations – including perhaps the United States – is not a debate that this work engages in.

14

Just what is terrorism is a necessary question to consider: “[b]ecause terrorism is what we are trying to explain, the most obvious question concerns what it is.” (Martha Crenshaw, “Questions to be Answered, Research to be Done, Knowledge to be Applied,” in Walter Reich, editor;

Origins of Terrorism: Psychologies, Ideologies, Theologies, States of Mind [Washington, D.C.:

Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1990], page 247). The works of Crenshaw as well as Walter Laqueur and Bruce Hoffman loom large in demystifying and clarifying the concept and enabling the use of the word in objective analytic terms, as opposed to the intellectually lazy pejorative that it is too often employed as. See Bruce Hoffman, Inside

Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), and several works by Walter Laqueur over several years, including the more recent A History of Terrorism, (New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2001). See also Boaz Ganor, “Defining Terrorism - Is One Man’s Terrorist Another Man’s Freedom Fighter?” Police Practice and Research: An International Journal, Volume 3, Issue 4, 2002; Crenshaw, Explaining Terrorism: Causes, Processes and Consequences (New York, Routledge, 2010), Isabelle Duyvesteyn, “How New Is the New Terrorism?” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Volume 27, Issue 5, 2004

15

The use of the term “terrorism” to describe the actions explored in this study is not an anachronistic application of a modern term or concept to a historical context that it would be foreign to; the term was regularly applied by the media, law enforcement, and others to describe these acts, even if then (as now) an exact definition of the term was difficult to ascertain.

16

For a historical exploration, see Arno J. Meyer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions, (Princeton University Press, 2000). Hoffman offers a discussion of French Revolutionary “terrorism” in the context of modern terrorism studies in Inside Terrorism.

17

See Asafa Jalata, "Terrorism from Above and Below in the Age of Globalization," Sociology

Mind, Volume 1, Number 1, pages 1-15, February 2011

Terrorism as Americans became most familiar with it during the twentieth century, a tactic adopted by the powerless seeking power –modern terrorism, “terror from below” – is defined in this work as the intentional use or threat of violence by sub-national agents against civilians, civilian institutions, and other non-combatants in an effort to promote a political goal broader than the specific targets of that violence. To create fear and terror in service of a political goal.

The political nature of the violence, as Hoffman convincingly argues, is essential in separating terrorism from other forms of violence.

This modern, sub-state terrorism is the object of inquiry of this work.

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY AND OTHER SCHOLARSHIP

In the Journal of American History in 2011, Beverly Gage argues that despite an unmistakable post-9/11 increase in the scholarship on terrorism in the American experience, it would still be “hard to classify this surge of work as a flourishing subfield or even a coherent

18

The debate surrounding the definition of terrorism has been ongoing in the social sciences, politics, the military, and media for some time now. The definition offered in this work, however, largely covers what is agreed-upon consensus ground in the definitional debate and steers clear of the more disputed aspects of terrorism, such as whether or not states can be

terrorist actors. Whether or not bombing a place and not a person constitutes terrorism is the one aspect of this definition that some may debate: that since no human was intentionally injured it falls short of terrorism, an admittedly ambiguous term. I disagree. The key intent of terrorism is the message projected and not the actual target struck, be it human or not. The human / object distinction therefore is less relevant in my estimation. Scholar of the 1960s (and particularly of the Weather Underground and German Red Army Faction) Jeremy Varon, for instance, has argued that such acts might constitute an “armed struggle” and not terrorism, arguing that usage of terrorism (a loaded pejorative) is a judgment of the politics behind the violence (See Varon, Bringing the War Home, page 329, N.3). I might argue the opposite – that calling it “armed struggle” rather than using “terrorism” in an intentionally neutral fashion is, itself, a judgement of the politics behind the violence.

19

Hoffman, Inside Terrorism, 14

historiography. Almost a decade out from 9/11, most U.S. historians remain hard-pressed to explain what terrorism is, how and when it began, or what its impact has been.”

More than five years removed from Gage’s foundational article, these words remain true. Historians have long explored those events and movements that might contribute to the history of terrorism in the United States, such as scholarship on anarchism and labor radicalism in the United States, and the Ku Klux Klan and other anti-civil rights violence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, the enduring indeterminateness of the subject (just what is terrorism?), or the unwillingness to apply what is a distinctly negative term to the subjects that many scholars study, or the hesitancy to appear to engage in presentism, in what is undeniably a critical issue in the modern U.S., have proven roadblocks to a more defined historiography. The works that have emerged instead tend to be “episodic, a series of discrete interventions rather than a consistent, developing conversation,” as Gage puts it. “Most historians who have engaged the subject remain wedded to a particular period and social context, shying away from broader conclusions.”

This dissertation attempts to meet the challenge more directly, to define what terrorism is and was; to explore a particular period, as Gage puts it, but to look beyond a particular social context and to explore broader conclusions, to bring itself and the works it cites into conversation as part of or related to the historiography of terrorism (and counterterrorism) in the American experience.

The historiography of the American sixties is vast.

Generally and overwhelmingly, the period is presented as a time of political unrest largely emanating from the political left. The evolving Civil

20

Beverly Gage, “Terrorism and the American Experience: A State of the Field,” Journal of American History, 74, June 2011.

21

Ibid., 82

22

Broad overviews of this most important era in U.S. (and world) history, such as the

noteworthy America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s by Maurice Isserman and Michael

Rights movement, for instance, has its own expansive and rich body of scholarship, and other scholars’ work informs this dissertation by exploring the evolution of the struggle for African American equality towards, in limited cases, the use of terrorism as part of the larger narrative.

The broad-based anti-war protest movement, and the New Left, have been the seeds from which the lion’s share of the scholarship exploring the era, and of U.S. terrorism of the era, has sprung. This dissertation explores if that disparity accurately reflects the history of the time, whether the political left was indeed responsible for such an imbalance of terrorism as the scholarship and popular history seems to suggest.

As far as this era goes, the Weather Underground has been by far the subject of the most scholarly writing and has produced a litany of memoirs by former members.

Scholars like Varon,

Kazin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), prove useful for big-picture context. Other notable scholarly syntheses include Mark Hamilton Lytle’s America's Uncivil Wars: The Sixties Era from Elvis to the Fall of Richard Nixon (Oxford University Press, 2006), and David Farber’s The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994). Todd Gitlin’s memoir / history, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1987) is an influential first-hand account of the era that largely reinforces – in fact was an early example of – the declension narrative of the 1960s.

23

On especially post-King and Civil Rights in the U.S. Northeast, see Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (New York: Harvard

University Press, 2006); and Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008) which explores the movement not just during the long Sixties but a more expansive lens of most of the twentieth century; also see Clarence Taylor, editor, Civil Rights in New York City: From World War II to the Giuliani Era (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011).

24

Standout scholarship on the group is highlighted by Jeremy Varon’s Bringing the War Home.

Former Weather Underground members (and their family, in at least one case) have found it difficult to NOT write memoirs and otherwise discuss their time as radicals. The long list includes Mark Rudd’s Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen (New York:

William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers, 2009), Cathy Wilkerson’s Flying Close to the Sun:

My Life and Times as a Weatherman (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007), Susan Stern’s With the Weathermen: The Personal Journal of a Revolutionary Woman (New York: Doubleday, 1975), and Thai Jones’s account of his family’s history of radicalism through the twentieth century, A Radical Line: From the Labor Movement to the Weather Underground (New York:

Free Press, 2004). They also frequently appear in other written historical accounts and

documentaries, including Sam Green and Bill Siegel’s 2002 documentary, The Weather

and more recently Arthur Eckstein, while acknowledging that Weather Underground sat within a larger field of political radicals in the United States, place tremendous emphasis on this group as the most impactful of the era.

Without disputing that claim, this dissertation focuses instead on the actions and impact of much-lesser-remembered historical actors of the era who in fact predated and paved the way for Weather’s actions.

Chief among the less-remembered historical actors this dissertation explores is radical leftist Sam Melville and the ‘collective’ of likeminded individuals that formed around him.

Despite what I argue is their precedent-setting campaign of bombings, the Sam Melville collective is largely ignored by historical scholarship of the era. Varon credits Melville and his collective as a prototype for other leftist bombers to follow, even if discussing the man and the group for only a few pages.

But the question this dissertation asks is if a closer look reveals an even greater import and relevance than most historians including Varon have acknowledged.

Underground and Dan Berger’s, Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity (California: AK Press, 2005) which relies on many oral histories with former members, but gravitates uncomfortably towards hagiography.

25

Arthur M. Eckstein’s new exploration of Weather Underground, Bad Moon Rising: How the Weather Underground Beat the FBI and Lost the Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), takes into account newly-declassified documents in an exploration of the emergence of Weather as well as important subjects like the organization’s relationship to violence and, very relevant to this work, the FBI’s obsession with capturing them that ultimately drove the Bureau to the illegal practices that ultimately ended up finding Bureau leadership, and not Weather Underground leadership, facing federal charges.

26

Bryan Burrough’s popular history account of the leftists of the era, Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence (New York:

Penguin Random House, 2015), similarly to Varon (almost verbatim in fact) gives Melville

credit as a trendsetter but also dedicates few pages, and in this case only of secondary-source

recitation, to the collective’s actions. Another account, Leslie James Pickering’s Mad Bomber

Melville (California: Arissa Media Group/PM Press, 2007) – the only book written specifically

on Melville – is superficial and so unrepentantly hagiographical to render itself of very limited

scholarly use.

Right wing political movements of the era have been explored by scholars, and many resorted to violence during the era. But the question of whether these movements and these actors belong in the conversation on terrorism of the era, and in the American experience more broadly, remain un- or under-explored.

Anticommunism in the United States, characterized by personalities like Senator Joseph McCarthy and organizations like the John Birch Society and the Minutemen, was among the principle right wing political movements of the era. But on the question of anticommunist terrorism the scholarship is nearly silent.

On another major manifestation of extreme right wing politics in New York City and elsewhere in the nation – Cuban exile anti-Castro activity – the scholarship is also relatively silent on the question of terrorism.

An idiosyncratic organization that represents the beginning and end of its particular brand of political radicalism in the U.S. – radical Jewish activism, as manifested by the Jewish Defense League (JDL) – has similarly been the subject of little historical scholarship, and none exploring them in the context of terrorism.

27

See Richard Gid Powers, Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977); David Farber and Jeff Roche, The Conservative Sixties (New York: Peter Lang, 2003). See also Ellen Schrecker’s No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1986), and Victor Navasky’s Naming Names: The Social Costs of McCarthyism (New York: Viking Press, 1980). The two principal anticommunist organizations of the era, the John Birch Society and the Minutemen, have been discussed by a limited number of scholars; see J. Harry Jones, Jr., The Minutemen (New York: Doubleday, 1968) for a still-unrivaled study of that group; and D.J.

Mulloy, The World of the John Birch Society: Conspiracy, Conservatism, and the Cold War (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2014) for the only scholarly study on the JBS.

28

The few more general accounts of anti-Castro activities in the United States include Warren Hinckle and William T. Turner’s The Fish Is Red: The Story of the Secret War Against Castro (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), and William M. LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluth’s more recent and scholarly Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

29

Little scholarship exists on the JDL. An unpublished 1981 CUNY Graduate Center Ph.D.

dissertation, “The Zionist Hooligans: The Jewish Defense League,” by Shlomo Russ (Sociology

Department) is the most extensive historical accounting of the JDL. While Russ’s dissertation is

For each of these movements and organizations on the political right, what little scholarship that has emerged is characteristic of the “discrete interventions” that Gage spoke of in her JAH article; terrorism is at best an ancillary consideration in these few works, and in any case does nothing to put JDL, or Cuban exile, or anti-communist activity, into a greater context of the era of terrorism in the U.S. more broadly.

Beyond but related to the scholarly intervention in political violence and terrorism of the era, how historians and other scholars have explored the policing and especially political policing of the era is also of central significance to this work. In keeping constant with the scholarly interpretation of terrorism of the era, the interpretive direction of scholarship on policing leans heavily toward the exploration of the excesses of authorities in opposition of various organizations, movements, and individuals on the political left.

The FBI has been a popular subject of historical scholarship almost since it emerged in the first decades of the twentieth century, but the Bureau’s image was carefully controlled by Director

tremendous scholarship on JDL not to be outdone in the pages dedicated to the group in this dissertation, the framework this dissertation applies – putting both the terrorist acts and the response to it in context of the broader picture of terrorism and counterterrorism in New York City during the era – is not one that Dr. Russ endeavored to in his own scholarship. See also JDL leader Meir Kahane’s The Story of the Jewish Defense League (Pennsylvania: Chilton Book Company, 1975), which necessitates a tremendously circumspect reading, and Alan

Dershowitz’s memoir The Best Defense (New York: Random House, 1982), which includes a chapter on his defense of JDL members on charges relating to their terrorist acts.

30

Only a scant few journal articles from outside of the discipline of history including a 2014 article by William Rosenau discuss the issue directly (See Rosenau, “The ‘First War on

Terrorism?’ – U.S. Domestic Counterterrorism during the 1970s and Early 1980s,” Washington, D.C.: CNA Center for Strategic Studies, October 2014). Rosenau, a former political scientist at the RAND Corporation, employed a focus that was broadly national. Generally, no scholarly writing explores the specific question of the rise of terrorism in New York City during the era;

the closest exception is Jeffrey A. Kroessler’s 2014 journal article, “Bombing for Justice: Urban

Terrorism in New York City from the 1960s through to the 1980s,”in Criminal Justice and Law

Enforcement Annual: Global Perspectives, Vol. 6-1.

Hoover during his long tenure that lasted until his death in 1972.

The FBI-as-counterterrorist- actor is a small subset of the scholarship that has largely, in past decades, focused on the illegal practices and intelligence excesses of the Bureau.

Characteristic of this subset of the scholarship is Pulitzer Prize winning author Tim Weiner’s Enemies: A History of the FBI, which explores the century-long history of the Bureau and places intelligence and terrorism at the center of that history: “We think of the FBI as a police force, arresting criminals and upholding the rule of law,”

Weiner explains. “But secret intelligence against terrorists and spies is the Bureau’s first and foremost mission today, and that has been true for most of the past hundred years.”

Weiner’s work, however, generally fails to make the important distinction between secret intelligence utilized against peaceful political protest, radical politics, and terrorism, creating an uncomfortable conflation of terrorism and other types of political dissidence, including peaceful and lawful (if vocal and vibrant) protest.

31

The most notable instance of this controlled image is Don Whitehead’s popular 1956 history of the Bureau, The FBI Story: A Report to the People (New York: Random House, 1956) – a whitewash, really, with careful guidance by the FBI and an introduction by Hoover himself.

32

Bryan Burrough argues “[t]he FBI has been America's
punching bag… ever since the first stories of its 1960's excesses began appearing in the wake of J. Edgar Hoover's death in 1972,”

so much so that “store shelves sag under the weight of books” taking the FBI to task (Bryan Burrough, Review of Broken: Not Your Father's F.B.I., by Richard Gid Powers, New York Times, October 24

, 2004). Other works to consider on the FBI include Burrough’s reviewed work by Richard Gid Powers, who has written extensively on the Bureau including this most recent work that argued the “battering” that the FBI was subject to in response to revelations about its illegal excesses in the 1960s and 1970s led to the “timid” FBI that failed to prevent 9/11. Also see Peter Lance’s 1000 Years for Revenge: International Terrorism and the FBI (New York, William Morrow & Co., 2003), and David Cunningham’s There’s Something

Happening Here - The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), which argues that the Bureau was only reluctantly brought to investigate the radical right – most notably the Klan – through substantial efforts by the Department of Justice, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and President Lyndon Johnson.

33

Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI at War, author’s note.

Some very accomplished scholarship argues an entirely different view than does Weiner.

Frank Donner’s Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America remains, a quarter center after publication, the most thorough examination of political policing not only in New York but elsewhere in the nation. In exploring federal authorities but more importantly local authorities like NYPD, Donner makes the opposite argument – that the intelligence operations Weiner lumps in the category of counterterrorism were in fact political policing. In making his argument, Donner never suggests that the political organizations and persons under investigation by the FBI and these local authorities were indeed sometimes threatening and committing violence or the terrorism that Weiner explores.

This dissertation explores whether, as in many things in life, the truth lies closer to the middle of these two binary arguments.

As far as NYPD is concerned, much of the scholarship on the police department is either general overview or specific to a particular incident of note, such as the highly impactful Knapp Commission investigating police corruption during the 1970s.

Gage and select others, however, have done exceptional work in exploring the NYPD in the earlier era of anarchist terrorism, and there have been a number of recent accounts of post-September 11

NYPD counterterrorism and

34

Frank Donner, Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Donner’s analytical bias is not surprising; an accomplished scholar and lawyer, he served as the Director of the American Civil Liberties Union's (ACLU) Project on Political Surveillance and had worked tirelessly throughout his long legal career to further left-leaning, anti-policing, and anti-intelligence practices in the United States. See Bruce Lambert, “Frank J. Donner Is Dead at 82; A Lawyer in Civil Liberties Cases,”

New York Times, June 11

, 1993.

35

See James Lardner and Thomas Reppetto, NYPD – A City and its Police (New York: Henry Holt, 2000) for a general overview, and for a study of the Knapp Commission, see Michael F.

Armstrong, They Wished They Were Honest: The Knapp Commission and New York City Police

Corruption (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).

intelligence activities.

But very little scholarly work explores the central questions of this study in any kind of depth, other than Donner’s standout work. The lone addition is former Detective Anthony Bouza’s recounting of the operations of the Bureau of Special Services, or BOSS, NYPD’s premier intelligence unit for decades including during the long Sixties.

This work engages with that shallow pool of scholarship that has explored NYPD counterterrorism and what those like Donner allege was political policing, and questions whether or not what is alleged to have been political policing – in violation of civil liberties – may have in fact been legitimate law enforcement efforts to counter terrorism.

36

The most notable of works on the modern NYPD is a lauded work by Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman, Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD’s Secret Spying Unit and bin Laden’s Final Plot Against America (New York: Touchstone, 2013), which was based on their Pulitzer Prize- winning Associated Press reporting.

37

Anthony Bouza, Police Intelligence: Operations of an Investigative Unit, (New York: AMS Press, 1976). Bouza details how BOSS “grew into an effective intelligence operation rather naturally and unconsciously” because of the challenges presented by the times – including

“terrorist acts of sabotage” and “the proliferation of radical political organizations.” (Bouza, Police Intelligence, 3). Frank Donner’s Protectors of Privilege also includes a very well- researched chapter on BOSS. While there is scant scholarship on NYPD’s efforts in

counterterrorism during the era, there have, however, been a surprising number of memoirs by other former members of the police department, beyond Bouza, that are tremendously useful despite the obvious caveats of caution that must be acknowledged when considering any memoir.

Those memoirs of most relevance are selections by former Chief of Detectives Albert Seedman, who investigated the Melville collective and the Weather Underground; former NYPD

Commissioner Patrick Murphy, whose dramatic restructuring of the Detective Division had a substantial impact; former BOSS Detective Jack Caulfield, who investigated Cuban Power; Ed Howlette, who infiltrated Revolutionary Action Movement; and former BOSS undercover operative Richard Rosenthal, who infiltrated the Jewish Defense League as a rookie policeman.

See Albert Seedman & Peter Hellman, Chief! Classic Cases from the Files of the Chief of

Detectives, (New York: Arthur Fields Books, 1974); Jack Caulfield, Caulfield, Shield #911-

NYPD (iUniverse, 2012); Ed Howlette Sr., Eric-83: Patriot or Traitor? A Precursor to Modern

Day Terrorism (Maryland: PublishAmerica, 2007); Richard Rosenthal, Rookie Cop: Deep

Undercover in the Jewish Defense League (New York: Leapfrog Press, 2000)

THE REEMERGENCE OF TERRORISM

The question of why terrorism reemerges in New York City is a compelling historical inquiry.

Terrorism had already reemerged elsewhere in the United States, most graphically illustrated by the KKK and the violent reaction to the Civil Rights movement in the south. Alabama’s Birmingham was often referred to as “Bombingham” well before terrorism reemerged in New York City, and even before the deadly 1963 terrorist attack on the 16

Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, because of the numerous bombs that had exploded there to counter the Civil Rights movement. At the Congress of Racial Equality’s (CORE) national convention in the summer of 1963, just months before the Baptist Church bombing, one delegate told a journalist that “[i]t is not easy to tell a man that is being beaten not to reach for his gun or his knife.”

Perhaps given that sentiment it is unsurprising that some decided to no longer turn the other cheek, and that some of those who decided to respond to violence with violence turned to the same tactic – terrorism – that was often being used against them.

As recently as 1962, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) – the origins from which the Weather Underground would spring – proclaimed in their “Port Huron Statement” that “[i]n social change or interchange, we find violence to be abhorrent… [i]t is imperative that the means of violence be abolished and the institutions – local, national, international – that encourage non-

38

M.S. Handler, “Militancy Grows, CORE Aides Warns,” New York Times, June 28

, 1963

39

This work, however, does not make the claim that all of the violence / reactionary violence

that often characterizes the second stage of the Civil Rights movement was terrorism; there was a

wide spectrum of violence ranging from the nationwide riots, assaults and assassinations of

police officers, violent rhetoric from the Black Panthers, RAM, and others, and to a much lesser

degree, terrorism and terrorist plots such as the Statue of Liberty plot.

violence as a condition of conflict be developed.”

The Weather Underground “Declaration of a State of War” that would emerge not eight years later, needless to say, adopted a much different approach to social change. Those eight years were violent years – in Vietnam, on college campuses like Kent and Columbia, at events like the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago in August of 1968. RAT Subterranean News, emerging as one of the most prominent underground press publications, argued after the Chicago DNC that “[t]he cops don’t understand. It’s not

‘hippies’ who are fighting with them in the streets… It’s white drop-outs who have buried their flowers and joined the community. It’s the kids who made the scene during the summer of love and then had to survive the New York winter.”

Jeremy Varon quotes flyers that had appeared plastered around New York City during the Columbia University protests earlier that same year:

“We must prepare ourselves to deal with the enemy. Our weapons: political education and tactical organization for students and workers: rocks, clubs, fire bombs, plastique, guns — but most of all

— commitment and courage.”

That the left, or rather some on the left, adopted violence in response to violence (as the CORE delegate warned) is not surprising. That it manifested as terrorism is only evidence of the dirty secret that, historically, terrorism as a tool of the less-powerful sometimes works.

But terrorism in New York City, and political left terrorism in the U.S. more generally, shouldn’t be seen as exclusively or even primarily a reaction to violence from the political right,

40

Tom Hayden et al, “Port Huron Statement,” Students for a Democratic Society, June 15

, 1962

41

Thorne Dreyer, “Lower East Side,” RAT Subterranean News, July 26 – August 8, 1968

42

Varon, Bringing the War Home, 26, citation number 15, “DARE WE BE HEROES?”

(anonymous flyer, 1968, University of California – Berkley)

43

See Hoffman, Inside Terrorism, especially Chapter 1, for a short discussion of the historical

instances from Northern Ireland to French occupied Algeria to mandate Palestine where

terrorism had a positive impact for those who employed it.

violence that had perpetuated ever since Reconstruction and had, in response to the Civil Rights movement, turned to the more blatant and visible terrorism of bombs. The reemergence of terrorism from the political left during the long Sixties can and should also be seen as a component of an increasingly radicalized left and, often, an increasing abandonment of the tenets of non- violence as espoused by the Dr. Kings and Port Huron Statements of the world. Terrorism was just one such manifestation of increasing levels of violence in all quarters. The SDS / Weatherman

“Days of Rage” in 1969. Rioting that spread through urban ghettos. It was a violent time and terrorism was perhaps a way to cut through the noise with your message, to achieve the headlines that too often were buried for lack of enough front pages to cover all of the tumult of the era.

Further, as Varon argues, the violence of the long Sixties in the U.S., including the reemergence of terrorism, must not be seem in a domestic vacuum – international considerations must be taken into account.

These include the war in Vietnam, the Cuban Revolution, international communism and anti-communism more generally, international independence movements from Algeria and Palestine to just over the northern border in Quebec, and the emergence of New Left and revolutionary political ideologies as espoused by the likes of Regis Debray, Frantz Fanon, and Mao Tse Tung.

44

As Jeremy Varon argues, it is important to keep in mind that while these terrorist acts manifested in the U.S., they are often not uniquely American. Movements and organizations discussed in this work to include Weather Underground, Cuban Power, the Minutemen and the Sam Melville collective, to name just a few, had either (or both) international influence or objectives. See Varon, Bringing the War Home.

45

Regis Debray’s Revolution in the Revolution? (1967) is a well-known and frequently cited book amongst New Left activists and extremists during the long Sixties. See Avi Shlaim, Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations, (New York: Verso, 2009) for a discussion of terrorism in the Israeli-Palestinian context, and Bruce Hoffman, Invisible Soldiers, Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917-1947, (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2015) for a

discussion of terrorism by both Jews and Muslims during mandate-era Palestine. Frantz Fanon’s

highly influential The Wretched of the Earth (1961), which had a tremendous impact on anti-

colonial and anti-imperialist movements and the justification of violence in service of them.